


ouroboros

by pyknicGinger



Category: One Piece
Genre: Character Study, M/M, POV Second Person, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyknicGinger/pseuds/pyknicGinger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zoro is too many things at once, some stitched-together mess of a human being, but then again Luffy isn't much better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ouroboros

**Author's Note:**

> (clearly) heavily influenced and inspired by Leoporidae_Lagomorpha's ["Nothing Less (or how I met the pirate king)"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2780879/chapters/6238466). it's a wonderful story and i really suggest everyone go read it.

For years, you think, you have been slowly drowning.

He is the ocean itself—the wild, chaotic, untamed sea; uncharted and incomprehensible, vast and vicious and forgiving and wonderful, so wonderful. He is the sun—the warm daylight on clear days that somehow give life to everything, melting away worries and fears and doubts, gently encouraging budded flowers to bloom; the scorching fire that burns a desert, that sucks everything dry and leaves the world desperate, dying of dehydration, that sets trees and people and hearts ablaze with absolutely no hope of release. He is the storm—every storm at once—hurricanes and cyclones and tsunamis, crashing in without a single warning, destroying, destroying, destroying so those left in his wake can build themselves up again, can start anew, can become something greater than they ever were.

You were the first to suffocate, to burn, to crumble—and the first to rise again.

Crucified as no one, you were freed as something more than yourself. You died there—died in that empty field, surrounded on all sides by stone walls too high to climb without determination and laid bare before a symbol of the world's corruption, reminiscing about days too far gone but still too close to leave behind. But then he'd launched himself into the dirt and pulled you up, incinerated your spirit and forged a new one from the melted ore of your ambition, morphed your very being.

You hadn't gone out in a blaze of glory and screams, though—not really. You'd smoldered for weeks, months, years—shaped and molded bit by bit, sometimes with fists and shouts, sometimes with gentle caresses so light you hadn't even known you were being touched. Your skin peeled off like the shedding of a dragon's, sticky from the egg at birth and then dry and cracked and squirming into adulthood; your spine cracked and bent, and the bones in your skull fused and broke and fused again, all at the hand of the King.

The King with a crown of straw, with a mantle of worn red cotton and jewels of memory and imagination and dream embedded deep in his unnatural skin. The King with an empire so vast there are no borders, no laws, no order. The harbinger of death, the giver of life itself, the ruler of everything and nothing all at once.

You had been nothing, a wandering reaper, perpetually lost in more than just the literal sense, a one-man army with no one to serve and no battles to fight, weak to your cracked core and so deep in denial you could stare starvation and solitude directly in the face without an ounce of recognition.

And then, steadily, you _became_.

You are the right arm of the King, his swords and his shield and his trust, his stepping stone in the unpredictable tides that he himself creates, the armor on his back and the cannons at his front. You are the throes of soldiers that will follow him to the death and then keep marching even after, the barrier between the evils of the world and the people of his country, the guard dog at the foot of his bed and the warrior at his side. You are his antithesis and his second self all at once, the rationality to his wrath, the strength to his despair; the same cut from the same gem of insatiable greed and unattainable desire, and the same thirst for carnage and adventure flows through your veins.

You spit in the face of logic and mortality, roaring impossible promises to the sky from a blood-and-tear stained jaw that is powerful now but will one day be strong enough to grind the bones of your enemies to dust around the hilt of a white relic of the past (and a symbol of the future, the same symbol you've sworn on twice now—once as a child, once as a man in a dingy slowly coming to realize that the transformation has already begun, that you are trapped, not the first declaration of loyalty but the first one to directly address the future on _this_ path). You laugh at bedlam and anarchy and private jokes, at the stupidity of some and the antics of others, and you smile when there is music and mischief and laughter, dancing and adrenaline, blood and booze.

You're the culmination of all of your scars—and of his, too, because you have shared in a fraction of his pain and would shoulder that burden again without a second thought. You are half of a phoenix, the first and second selves burned and born again from the ashes of who you were, but not the fire— _he_ is. He is the catalyst, the beginning, the spark against the cement that set you, the wood of the bonfire, alight.

He is something greater than you, and yet he looks at you like you're juxtaposed on the same pillar near the heavens, places the same trust in you that you do him, offers the same self in equal measure. He is your strength, your sea and sky and sun and air, your goal, your mortal god. You would cut the earth in half if he asked, dive to the depths of the ocean or start a war or destroy the world, save your enemies or kill thousands, defy existence itself, all for him.

You've always been who you are, but now you're so much more. You're a living contradiction, the pirate Pirate Hunter, the Demon of the East Blue no longer anywhere near that sea, the tenth on a list of eleven hell raisers that doesn't mean a thing anymore. You're a wild beast that can't be leashed, can't be domesticated or taught or trained, but you're loyal to one man and one man alone. You're trapped and yet freer than you've ever been, tangled in the web of your Captain, of Monkey D. Luffy, of the King of the Pirates; in love with a man who isn't a legend yet (although you think you might be wrong about that, because he'd taken the three strongholds of justice in his fists and crushed them—Eneis Lobby, Impel Down, Marineford—all within a single year) but will be soon. And when they write his story in the history books, they will list you down, too, and say you were always by his side.

The Greatest Swordsman in the World, First Mate of the Straw Hat Pirates. Roronoa Zoro.


End file.
